The term “Middle Ages” contains a prejudice: that the era was merely an unremarkable void straddling antiquity and modernity. Recent scholarship has eroded this perception. The era produced Dante, Chaucer and Boccaccio as well as significant leaps in mathematics and even algorithms and cryptography. It was, moreover, a time when the lust for life was great and the powerful had lust aplenty. Bruce Holsinger’s captivating historical novel A Burnable Book is testimony to this more accurate view of a fascinating period.

The scene is London in 1385. Reigning over England is Richard II, later to adorn one of Shakespeare’s plays. The church is divided between Rome and Avignon while England hangs in the balance. A book, the “burnable” one of the title, appears, allegedly written during the reign of William the Conqueror. The book prophesies in historically accurate terms the death of every English king from William to Richard. Thus it falls to the book’s many temporary owners to decipher that prophecy and save, or not save, the reigning monarch.

But the true authorship of the book remains mysterious. Is it Chaucer, soon to write his Canterbury Tales? Is it Lollius, to whom the Roman poet Horace addressed one of his odes? Or is it the son of the novel’s narrator, who chews the fat with Chaucer and does some sleuthing of his own, even slinking into the brothels to ask prostitutes pointed questions? Thus the novel careens from court to academia, from house of God to house of ill repute, with scandalous overlap between the latter two.

The novel’s action proceeds at a steady clip and has the stench of authenticity, detailing everything from methods of torture to the happy custom of throwing refuse into the street. Its prose is erudite and focused, reading more like an academic thriller than a frilly period piece: John Grisham meets Umberto Eco. And Holsinger has clearly ventured to imbue his writing with the earthy English words that Orwell, among others, favored over their highfalutin’ Latinate counterparts. The language is also often bawdy, as befits a novel about bawds.

In his own book about England, Paul Theroux argued that England had been written about perhaps more than any other country, but the England he meant was likely that of Dickens, Austen or Hardy. About medieval England we know almost nil. This clever novel, as contemporary as it is distant, helps illuminate an England consigned for ages to a stagnant darkness.

As World War II is to the United States, a conflict endlessly memorialized, representing the nation's crowning achievement before its inevitable decline, so World War I is to Great Britain. Little surprise, then, that on the latter war's centennial, another novel that centers on it should appear: Wake, by British author Anna Hope. As the homonym title suggests, however, Wake is less about the war than its aftermath. It's also less about men than women.

These women include Hettie, who dances for pay with crippled ex-soldiers; Evelyn, a former munitions factory employee now charged with addressing veterans' complaints; and Ada, a mother mourning her allegedly KIA son Michael. Unearthing Michael's true fate ties the women's stories together, and the truth is far from fodder for patriotic song.

The unifying male is Evelyn's brother, Ed, who charms Hettie with his wild talk about anarchism, his boozy vulnerability and his fondness for jazz and cocaine. These are Ed's ways of coping with impotence brought about by service as a captain. Meanwhile, Evelyn has stumbled on Michael's story through a visit from a brother-in-arms, while Ada consults psychics in a desperate attempt to commune with her son.

It has become fashionable to present apparently disparate plots that cleverly converge in the end. Hope can be forgiven for falling for this trope, as her characters are vivid and credible, which is harder to achieve than literary legerdemain. There is a peculiarly British, phlegmatic heroism in the women's efforts to recover from a very unheroic war.  Their dignity matches that of the forsaken veterans, forced to beg or sell trifles in the streets.

“Good prose,” said Orwell, “is like a windowpane.” By that criterion Hope's is an achievement: Rarely, as too often happens in contemporary fiction, does the writer's ego enter into the writing. Instead, Hope lets the story and the characters do the work. That said, the novel's anti-war message could hardly be less obvious. Witness Ed saying, before an admittedly fatuous Armistice Day celebration, that neither side had been victorious. "War wins." True enough in this war, but as fatuous as that celebration when applied to others.

Still, Wake is an impressive first novel. It’s a potent reminder that the scars of WWI on the British psyche run deep, and Hope’s postwar, feminine twist on the usual guys-mud-and-guts treatment make it a unique, engaging read.

In her second novel, author Deborah Johnson takes readers on an intoxicating, ominous and redemptive journey into a special world. At its heart, The Secret of Magic is the story of three people seeking justice, but it also explores how a foreign place can worm into a person's soul.

That person is Regina Mary Robichard. Regina is a rare individual—a female, black law student in 1946—but she lives in the shadow of her mother, a prominent civil rights activist.

Regina works for the Legal Defense Fund, under the famed Thurgood Marshall. One day, while sifting through discrimination claims from Negro servicemen, she opens an envelope from Mary Pickett Calhoun stuffed with newspaper clippings about the death, ruled accidental, of decorated Negro Lt. Joe Wilson Howard, whose body was dragged from a Mississippi river.

The spark that ignites Regina, whose father was lynched before she was born, is a snapshot of Howard and his adoring father. And it didn’t hurt that Calhoun is the author of Regina's favorite childhood book, The Secret of Magic, about three children who explored the Magnolia Forest under the watchful eye of Mr. Lemon.

Once she arrives in Revere, Mississippi—also the setting of Johnson's debut novel The Air Between Us—Regina meets two people who will be important to her case, Miss Mary Pickett and Willie Willie, the dead soldier's father. The killer is soon revealed, but knowing isn't the same as proving in Mississippi. The book is more about Regina discovering that in segregated Mississippi, blacks and whites actually coexist better than in her beloved New York City. She also detects that many characters in her children's book are based on real people, and that volume's magical land finally produces rough justice for the slain soldier.

This gifted author has produced a novel which not only shows that first impressions of a region and its people aren't accurate, but also that justice isn't a black-and-white but rather a fluid concept. She leaves the reader yearning for another visit to Revere.

Leila Meacham’s new novel, Somerset, begins in 1835 South Carolina with the stories of three of the state’s most prominent, plantation-owning families: the Warwicks, DuMonts and Tolivers. Silas Toliver has been left out of his father’s will. With his father dead and all of his family’s land and money bequeathed to his brother, Silas has two choices: Stay in South Carolina, where he will live the rest of his life without ever owning the expansive plantation he aches for, or follow his best friend and counterpart Jeremy Warwick to Texas, where fear of the unknown meets promises of fertile land and opportunity.

Anyone who has read Roses, the prequel to this novel, knows the three families end up in Texas somehow. But the “somehow” turns into a story you do not want to miss. Like its predecessor, Somerset also spans three generations of characters and nearly 100 years of history, only the Civil War and the Texas Revolution are now the historical backdrops.

Meacham writes with the authority of someone who has not only studied history but has sincerely considered how it affects those living within it. Characters do not merely leave as they enter. They change. Though they may remind us of ones we’ve seen in other novels, Meacham reminds us that even the most unlikely characters can change their views as they encounter new people and new experiences. Such changes make the novel come alive in ways you’ve never thought possible of a novel set in the 1800s, and should recommend it to readers of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help or Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.

Somerset has everything a compelling historical epic calls for: Love and war, friendship and betrayal, opportunity and loss, and everything in between.

At the start of The Swan Gondola, Timothy Schaffert’s enchanting new historical novel, two elderly spinster sisters discover a man in their front yard who has fallen from the sky (or from a hot air balloon, at least). The man in question is Ferret Skerritt, a ventriloquist turned star-crossed lover with an incredible tale to tell. 

The story-within-a-story begins several months earlier, in the spring of 1898, at the opening of the Omaha World’s Fair. Ferret, who rolls with a Fellini-like crew of freaks and circus performers, becomes enchanted by Cecily, a beautiful member of a traveling horror troupe. (She plays Marie Antoinette and nightly has her head chopped off.) Despite a rocky start, the two quickly fall in love, and their relationship blossoms amid the magic and mysteries of the fair.But as with all too-good-to-be-true romances, a threat looms. Here, it’s in the form of William Wakefield, an older Fair investor who has an eye on Ferret’s dummy, Oscar—not to mention Cecily herself. 

Schaffert clearly did a tremendous amount of research for this book, and he’s at his best when cleaving to historical detail and quirky fact. The uncanny automatons cackle with life; the late-night séances are chill-inducing; and the sinking of the USS Maine is on everyone’s mind. But Schaffert’s period authenticity is also literary in nature. He’s clearly a fan of L. Frank Baum, and Wizard of Oz references are plentiful, though at times heavy-handed.

The Swan Gondola will no doubt garner comparisons to Water for Elephants and The Night Circus, and fans of such historical romances will not be disappointed. There’s plenty of magic to go around in this good, old-fashioned love story.

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Read our Q&A with Timothy Schaffert about The Swan Gondola.

Losing a loved one to the chaos of war would be devastating enough, but lingering doubt as to whether a husband were alive or dead could slowly consume a wife. Especially if her last words to him were an ultimatum: Choose his reporting work, or her. In The Wind Is Not a River, Helen and John Easley find themselves caught in the upheaval of World War II, separated emotionally and physically by the lengths to which he will go for a story.

John poses as a lieutenant to sneak into the Japanese-occupied Aleutian Islands, hoping to report about this little-known theatre of the war—which the Americans would prefer the press keep quiet about. His plane goes down on the island of Attu as the novel opens, and instantly the reader is thrust into his fight for survival. The weather is unrelenting and unstable, the only food available is what he and the crash’s only other survivor, young airman Karl, can catch and kill, and discovery by Japanese soldiers is a daily threat.

Helen, at home with her guilt and her ill father, eventually can take the waiting no longer. She, too, lies her way north to Alaska, joining a troupe of USO Swingettes, in a passionate effort to find John.

Canadian writer Brian Payton deftly juxtaposes Helen’s and John’s separate struggles to stay alive and sane against forces that would render them otherwise. Set against a meticulously described Alaskan setting, each harrowing or quietly painful minute is portrayed in realistic detail. John’s ordeal proves miraculous and heartbreaking, told in passages that are sometimes difficult to read due to their intensity of rawness or sorrow. The book arcs poetically across the distance between Helen and John, drawing out the separation that they (and the reader) can hardly bear.

Sometimes life presents you with a slate of bad choices—though some are braver than others. In Motherland, Maria Hummel, author of several novels and a former Stegner Fellow in poetry, enters relatively unfamiliar literary territory to tell the story of one so-called Mitläufer family: German citizens who would never have personally countenanced the terrible abuses that Jews suffered, but nonetheless went along with the Nazi regime. They paid for it in the end—if not as heavily as their Jewish counterparts.

The Kappus family has already gone through heartbreak: Liesl and Frank are recently married after the death of Frank’s first wife (in childbirth with their third son). When Frank is drafted into medical military service, Liesl is left alone to care for his three sons during the last months of WWII, with the front growing ever closer and food and resources becoming more scarce.

Hummel gathered her raw material from the life of her grandfather, reflected in letters written during the war and discovered in an attic wall. Just as Londoners suffered under the Blitz, German citizens spent the last year of the war living as no human being should, amid the horrors of daily air raids and the loss of those they loved. Hummel somehow manages, without sensationalism, to drive home the humanity and suffering of the people who are frequently considered only as the enemy.

Like its characters, Motherland displays little awareness of the Jewish experience, a fact that may trouble some readers. In her afterword, Hummel argues that omission was necessary in order to present her characters’ lives authentically, asking “What did [German citizens] know and when did they know it?” Perhaps only now is the world ready to offer understanding. Without canceling out our sympathy for those targeted by the Nazis, this humane and compelling story may extend it to those who (often unwittingly) assisted in some of humanity’s worst crimes—and who themselves got flicked by the tail of the beast.

April Smith, creator of the popular Detective Ana Grey novels, makes a change of pace with A Star for Mrs. Blake. This moving and surprising novel is the account of a Gold Star Mother’s sojourn to the fields of Verdun where her only son was killed, along with so many other young men, during World War I.

The reader would expect such a story to be moving, but what’s surprising is the toughness that Smith gives to her characters, especially Cora Blake, the Gold Star Mother. But why shouldn’t she be tough? When we first meet her, it’s during a freezing cold Depression-era Maine winter. Her parents are dead, her son is dead and she’s raising her motherless nieces. She and the girls are saved from penury when she gets a job in a sardine cannery that she must walk to because there’s no more gas to fuel the bus. Somehow, she’s managed to survive: She even has a suitor. Then, the letter comes, inviting her to visit the grave of her son in France. She decides to look forward to her voyage the way her seafaring parents looked forward to their trips around the world.

Cora’s sojourn puts her in more modest company, however. She becomes part of a group that includes an Irish housekeeper, a Jewish chicken farmer’s wife, a socialite and, almost, an African-American seamstress. The near inclusion of Mrs. Russell is our first reminder that, Depression and fallout from World War I aside, things aren’t quite right in America.

Still, most of the folks Cora meets are delightful company, including her minders, the plucky nurse Lily Barnett and the upstanding, infinitely patient and cheerful Lt. Hammond. Cora also strikes up a friendship with journalist Griffin Reed. Disfigured in the war, he’s a morphine addict who’s being kept by the artist who helped design the mask that conceals his wounds.

But as entertaining as the trip is, Smith, a lucid writer with a detective’s eye for detail, doesn’t let us forget the painful event that launched her heroine’s journey. Reed’s shattered face, rows of gravestones on a field, live ordnance found too near to a picnic area—all remind the reader of the grotesque wastefulness of the war that began a century ago. Through Cora Blake’s story, Smith explores the experience of some of the good, ordinary and resourceful people who were caught up in it.

In the tradition of Mary Renault, Sigrid Undset and, more recently, Hilary Mantel, novelist Nicola Griffith recreates the past in Hild, a lively look at the girl who would become Saint Hilda of Whitby, one of the key figures of early Christianity.

Hild was born in 614, the niece of one of England’s most powerful tribal kings. Little is known about her early life, though the story is that her mother was told in a dream that she would give birth to the light of the world. Hild was part of the king’s court when the entire household was baptized as Christians in 627. Twenty years later, she became the abbess of one of the most notable religious communities in Europe, counselor to kings and a teacher of bishops.

The novel begins with the death of Hild’s father when she was three, and ends when she is 19, well before she became an abbess. Griffith’s young Hild is perceptive, canny and thoughtful. Fulfilling the prophecy of her birth, she becomes a seer and advisor to her uncle. She is quick to understand the value of literacy, the impact of trade routes and the power behind the new religion. Her observations of the natural world lead her to understand what motivates those around her. She forms relationships easily with the common folk, developing networks of loyal followers.

Medieval England was a complex landscape of warring dynasties and vicious politics, and is probably less familiar to the reader than the court of Henry VIII or even Alexander the Great’s Macedonia. Griffith has clearly immersed herself in this world to bring it to life for the reader—the politics, languages, occupations as well as the food, dress and drink—and this extensive research occasionally threatens to overtake the characters. But the details are engrossing, and her depiction of a young woman whose actions would change history is a compelling one.

Many an English student has speculated about the mystery of Satis House and the “witch of the place,” Miss Havisham, as introduced in Dickens’ Great Expectations. Left at the altar on her wedding day, she spends her remaining days as a bitter, living ghost inside her family’s home. Enter Scottish novelist Ronald Frame and his novel, Havisham, which imagines the early life of this fascinating literary character.

The only offspring of a wealthy brewer, Catherine is a precocious child. When her father eventually passes away and leaves her his fortune, she is sent to live with an aristocratic family to learn refinement. However, the only man she seems to be attracted to is Charles Compeyson, a charming, dishonest rogue—who, as we know from Dickens, will cause her heartbreak.

Frame wants the reader to feel emotion for Catherine; he makes her human. An excellent example of a present-day writer taking on a classic, Havisham gives the reader food for thought while reviving one of the great characters of Victorian literature.

Eleanor Catton’s historical suspense novel The Luminaries is built like a triple Decker—one of those 19th-century novels that were so substantial, they were published serially in three volumes. Clocking in at over 800 pages, this pitch-perfect Victorian pastiche set in New Zealand has all the right elements: long-lost siblings, hidden caches of letters, a séance and a villainess so wicked she could have walked right out of a Wilkie Collins novel.

When Walter Moody comes to Hokitika in 1866, it is to make his fortune in the gold fields. At his hotel, he happens upon a meeting of 12 men nervously discussing a rash of mysterious local occurrences. A prostitute has been arrested after overdosing on opium. A wealthy man has disappeared. A recluse was discovered dead in his isolated cabin. Moody is drawn into the intrigue, though he initially keeps his own secrets about the strange events that occurred on his voyage from England.

Several period devices help tease out the threads of this complex story: multiple narrators; 19th-century slang and circumlocutions such as “d-mned”; and chapter introductions that set the stage for the action to follow. Intriguingly, Catton uses astrology as an organizing device, with star charts at the start of each chapter—which grow shorter and shorter as the book progresses, to imitate the waning of the moon—and the circling of 12 “stellar” characters around eight “planetary” ones.

Like many long novels, The Luminaries lags at times; in some ways, the action concludes long before the novel does, and the wealth of characters and overlapping action make it occasionally difficult to keep track of who did what when. But Catton, whose debut novel, The Rehearsals, was written when she was just 22, balances this with accomplished writing that shows an engaging flair and a real gift for characterization. This multilayered and complex second novel is as much about the sheer enjoyment of reading as it is about solving the crime.